I kinda forgot about this. Here is the full vesion of the article that I sent to Aircraft Illustrated ( thier final check came in the mail today). I told them to edit it as they saw fit so there is actually more here than they printed in the mag.
Where to start…? I guess I should start at the very beginning. I’ve been an aviation enthusiast all my life, as was my father. He hand built free flight gas engine model planes as a youth, then built the real thing when he worked for Curtis Wright. When World War II came, he enlisted in the U.S.Navy and was lucky enough to be stationed on board an aircraft carrier in the Pacific where he served untill the end of the war. He passed his love of aviation on to me. Like many boys, I built many plastic airplanes(and a few balsa wood flyers) growing up, and have continued to do so to this day. As with many modelers this hobby led to another, photography. The first challenge is to build a model that looks real, the second is to try and present it in a believable photograph.
Now with that background established, I’ll speak about this particular project. I have been intrigued by the world of so called “Black Aircraft” for a very long time. Bill Sweetmans books on stealth and the Aurora are like bibles to me, I find the technology involved to be totally fascinating! When Testors modeling company produced the “XR-7 Thunderdart” model I got one as soon as I could. While it was similar to the FDL-8 shape purported to be the base design of the Aurora, the top of the model was totally wrong so I began modifying it to more closely resemble the Aurora shape. When finished it bore a striking resemblance to several artworks of the Aurora model (mission accomplished!!). So naturally the next step was to photograph it. I didn’t have a ground area that I felt worked as an acceptable background, so I decided to do an “in flight“ photograph. Most of my models are hung from the ceiling of my home with a very simple bridle of monofiliment fishing line, so I just used this to hang it outside.
<img src="http://publish.hometown.aol.com/kaptor369/images/bridle.jpg" border=0>
I hung this bridle from another line strung between a ladder and a post. The camera was either my Minolta XG-7 or XGM 35mm SLRs, I had to use a wide angle zoom lens to get the pics I wanted because I couldent get far enough away with a standard lens. The model is probobly between 5 and 6 feet above the ground. I took a few pics from various angles, all from below to avoid buildings and vegitation that would ruin the scale. Once I took the pics, I put them in a refrigerator butter compartment, as this is a good place to keep film, until I could get them developed. There they stayed and were forgotten about (out of sight out of mind!). I don’t know for sure how old the pics actually are, but my records indicate I finished building the plane in October of 1994 so it should have been soon after that. I finally made a special effort to get the film developed in October of 2002. I had forgotten what was even on the film by then and actually figured that the film was long since ruined, and that developing them would be a waste of money, but I did it anyway! The first 3 or 4 pics on the roll were just imageless brown colored disasters, I figured “oh well” but then the next one was one of the Aurora pics and WOW it was great!! Many of the pics exibited a blotchy texturing ,but in the case of the Aurora pics it just gave them a “far away” look adding an artificial distance haze, PERFECT!!
I was so exited, I wanted to share them with my modeling/flightsim/aviation friends on the internet, so I scanned the best pics, cropped them (in the original pics the plane image is quite small) then compressed them to make them manageble for the internet posting, (that’s absolutely ALL I did to them), but my website was having problems so I had to E-mail them to some friends to post for me.
Once they were on the net, I got a little mischievous and decided to say as little as possible about the pics and just see what happened, my hard rule was that I wouldent fabricate any information although a little exaggeration would add some fun to it, I would tell the truth or say nothing, and that’s what I did. I had intended to let this run for about a week, but then an equally mischievous friend convinced me to let it ride since it was stirring up a lot of new interest in the whole Aurora/Black projects subject. I only posted them at 2 websites, but they began showing up everywhere (one site even atributed them to a Chinese website!!). So that’s the TRUE story of these pics. I am solely responsible for their existance but not for some of the outrageous things people have said about them. I have been facinated by people spotting “strings” that aren’t there, and proposing how the object was a freeflight Radio Controlled model. Only one pic has the line showing up at all ( I used a cropped version of that pic to highlight the bridle arrangement). Some of the pics exibit a verticle line or lines in the frame, I believe these are artifacts produced by the extended time in the fridge.
Mischievously Yours:
Boomer
(no lawyers were hurt in the crafting of this document)
Well that's it folks, if you stil have any questions feel free to ask. Hey, what should I do next? LOL
"We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us". George Orwell
Fighting For Justice With Brains Of Steel !
<img src="http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/atengun2X.GIF" border=0>
Edited by - boomer on Jan 11 2003 5:47 PM
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
I must admit that I am curious as to the further details of this situation... but instead of directly putting pressure on you to stipulate more information, I shall do it indirectly. I've heard of RBCC before, but never researched it thorougly... after doing so today I definitely believe that this is the sytem that powers the Aurora, very intruiging...especially with the capability of producing up to 500,000 lbs. of thrust. Thanks for the input.
